Mural Reveals Pre-Classic Maya as a Civilized Society

Inside a ruined pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, archeologists have unearthed the oldest known Maya painting, a brightly colored 30-foot-long mural depicting the Maya creation myth and the coronation of the Maya’s first earthly king.

The paint-on-plaster image, 3 feet tall and nearly 2,100 years old, is several centuries older than other depictions of the creation myth.

“It’s the equivalent for the Maya of the biblical account of Genesis, but it’s more than that because it provides a link between the gods of creation and the Maya kings,” said archeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli of Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the discovery.

That story has been passed down almost unchanged into the modern era, said archeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, who discovered the mural.

“A Mayan today could say, ‘This story is the same story I tell my kids,’ ” he said.

The mural was discovered at the remote site of San Bartolo, about two days’ hike north of the once-powerful Maya city of Tikal.

In a full palette of colors and in intricate detail, a series of scenes in the mural shows the maize god creating earth, ocean and skies and ultimately crowning himself king. The final scene shows the similar crowning of the first human king in the company of the gods.

Archeologist David Freidel of Southern Methodist University, who was not involved in the research, called the painting a “masterpiece.”

The scenes “are executed with the confidence, compositional imagination and technical perfection of an artist who, while anonymous, must rank with the best the world has ever known.”

In a related finding near the mural, Guatemalan archeologist Monica Pellecer Alecio discovered the oldest known tomb of a Maya king, dating from about 150 BC.

The findings were announced Tuesday in Washington at a news conference sponsored by the National Geographic Society and will be reported in the January issue of National Geographic magazine.

The discoveries support the arguments of many researchers that the social structures and culture of the Maya Classic period, which extended from AD 300 to AD 900, actually were in place much earlier.

Many archeologists have argued that the pre-Classic societies, dating back to 300 BC, were not fully civilized because they did not have writing and did not have formal kingships similar to those of later periods.

The newly found mural, whose images are accompanied by text, undermines both of those arguments “without any doubt,” Estrada-Belli said. It shows that the early Maya had a sophisticated system of writing and that their kings obtained and exercised their powers with all the trappings and symbols of kingship found in later Maya societies.

Indigenous people began farming the San Bartolo area around 700 BC and started constructing a plaza and pyramids 300 years later, Saturno said. It never became a powerful city and was largely abandoned by AD 100. Subsequent societies filled many of the early buildings with rubbish and built dwellings over them, he said, but the area did not function as a Maya city again.

The room containing the mural -- located at the rear of a pyramid -- was filled with rubble about the time San Bartolo was abandoned. Two of the walls of the room, which also bore murals, were smashed and used for fill. The team has been collecting fragments from those murals and hopes eventually to reassemble them.

The mural on a third wall was discovered by Saturno in 2001 when, exhausted and dehydrated, he sat in a looter’s trench to escape the bright sun and glimpsed one of the figures on it. The 4-foot-long mural, done only in red, black, yellow and pink, showed a variety of figures standing and kneeling, with a geometric border around them.

Saturno suspected the presence of a mural on the remaining wall, but had to build a tunnel through the rubble to reach it. He was astonished when he revealed the multicolored image that, he said, looked remarkably well preserved.

“In Western terms, it’s like knowing only modern art and then stumbling on a Michelangelo or a Leonardo,” he said.

The first part of the mural shows the creation of the world. Four figures, all variants of the son of the maize god, set up the physical world. One stands in water, offering a fish, establishing a watery underworld. A second stands on ground and sacrifices a deer, establishing the land.

The third floats in the air, offering a turkey, thereby establishing the sky. The fourth stands in a field of flowers, offering fragrant blossoms, the food of gods, thus establishing paradise in the east, where the sun is reborn daily.

The next section shows the maize god crowning himself king on a wooden scaffold, and shows his birth, death and resurrection, bringing sustenance to the world.

Epigraphers are having difficulties deciphering much of the text accompanying the images because it is subtly different from the hieroglyphics of the Classic period, said archeologist Karl Taube of UC Riverside.

Taube is trying to crack the code by comparing the writing with that on nearly identical images found on the Popol Vuh, a famous Maya text written 1,600 years later.

Alecio’s team found the royal tomb under another small pyramid about a mile from the one containing the mural.

The tomb contained three chambers. The bottom chamber held the bones of a man buried with a jade plaque -- the symbol of Maya royalty -- on his chest. That chamber also contained a large green stone figurine and seven vessels, including a frog-shaped bowl and a vase bearing the effigy of the rain god, Chac.